Total pages in book: 183
Estimated words: 174715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 874(@200wpm)___ 699(@250wpm)___ 582(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 174715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 874(@200wpm)___ 699(@250wpm)___ 582(@300wpm)
We discuss this option and decide on that path because I just need to control whatever I can control, starting with my body which I let control me that night with Cole. “Wait to start it until we get the blood test back just to be safe,” she says, “but that’s really just a precaution. I don’t believe you’re pregnant.” She hands me a prescription and just like that I’m on birth control with absolutely no sex life at all. And clearly no business picking up men and playing games.
I exit to the street, and think of Cole with that brunette in the bar. I felt like I really connected with Cole. Like I was different to him and he absolutely was to me. I liked remembering that night that way. Why did I go to the bar last night and ruin that perfect memory? I really wish I had never seen them. I wish I could just remember being the Cinderella that got spanked by one hell of a hot man.
Chapter fourteen
Cole
Houston, TX
Saturday night…
Isit in the living room of my penthouse hotel room in downtown Houston listening to Jane and Charlie, junior co-counsels on the case, sitting on either side of me arguing over points in my opening statement. I stand up and watch the floor-to-ceiling windows wrapping the open space, the sun beginning to dip beneath the horizon, red, yellow, and blue swirling together in a complex manner.
“He didn’t kill her,” Jane snaps at Charlie.
Her, being my client’s wife.
“He had blood all over his hands and face,” Charlie argues.
Jane makes a frustrated sound. Charlie is my age, Italian, vocal, and established. He loves to play devil’s advocate, which makes him one hell of a second chair. Jane is young, pretty, and needs to learn restraint. I’m not convinced she can control a courtroom. I catch myself on that one. Age isn’t the issue. She’s Lori’s age and Lori possesses extreme restraint and I have no doubt that she rules a courtroom when she’s present. The spanking was a mistake, at least that night, that cost me any future with Lori. I made her feel like I would demand the control she feels she needs.
“Of course he had blood on his face and hands,” Jane argues. “He ran to her and hugged her. He was frantic on the 911 call.”
I turn and face them. “He didn’t kill her,” I say. “And the blood he had all over him isn’t an indication of guilt, but innocence. No one who loves someone could leave them on the floor with a knife in their chest, and not pull it out and hold them close. And that’s exactly what I’m going to say in my opening statement.”
And I’m going to make it seem like I know what love is. I don’t. I only know this new obsession I have with Lori, but I’ll use that. She’ll help me with this case. She’ll allow me to connect to the passion a man would have for a woman he can’t bear to never see again. Something I have never felt ever in my life, until Lori. Perhaps it’s me wanting what I can’t have, the chase, and all that manly bullshit. Or maybe it’s her.
Lori
New York City, NY
I sit in Cat and Reese’s living room, listening as Reese’s team and Cat, who always helps him with his cases, as they debate the details on a case about to head to trial. The client is a woman who killed her husband, who beat her regularly, and there are witnesses, photos, and calls by neighbors to the police. The prosecution says that he threatened her family and so she slowly poisoned him. She says she didn’t do it. She loved him. She loved him desperately.
“You’re sure she didn’t do this, boss?” Elsa, one of Reese’s co-counsels asks, an older version of Cat’s blonde confident beauty. She sits in the chair to my left.
“I don’t represent guilty people,” Reese says, from an ottoman he’s pulled to the center of the room. “You know that. Next question.” When Reese says move on, in his intense attorney mode, you move on. He’s good-looking and tall, dark and handsome, funny at times, a bit like Cole, only different. Cole is different. I shake off that thought without further definition.
The man had another woman two nights ago. It’s time to forget him.
“What’s another source of the poison in question?” Richard asks, from the chair to my right. He’s the second co-counsel, who is handsome, confident, and currently running fingers through his longish wavy brown hair, as if thinking about his own questions.
“What about a food source?” Elsa says. “If we can find a food source high in that toxin, we can create reasonable doubt.”
“It might create doubt,” Cat says, shaking her head in the spot next to me, “or just come off desperate and farfetched.”